No Life of Their Own: And Other Stories Read online

  I can see how wild things might take to Nature Boy. He is fur all over, real sleek, glossy fur, and he wears nothing but that little pair of pants. Turn him loose without those pants and someone would be bound to take a shot at him.

  So we sat there wondering what to do. Then I remembered that Pa had said a new family had moved onto the Pierce place and we decided to go down and see if they had any kids.

  We went down the road to the old Pierce place and it turned out there was one just about our age. He was a sort of runty little kid, with a peaked face and big round eyes and kind of eager look about him, like a stunted hoot owl.

  He told us his name and it was even worse than Nature Boy’s and Fancy Pants’ names, so we had a vote on it and decided we would call him Butch. That suited him just fine.

  Then he called out his family and they stood in a row, like a bunch of solemn, runty owls roosting on a limb, while he introduced them. There was his Ma and Pa and a little brother and a kid sister almost as big as he was. The rest of them went back into the house, but Butch’s Pa squatted down and began to talk with us.

  You could see from the way he talked that he was a little scared of this farming business. He admitted he really was no farmer, but an optical worker, and explained to us that an optical worker designed lenses and ground them. But, he said, there was no future in a job like that back on his old home planet. He told us how glad he was to be on Earth and how he wanted to be a good citizen and a good neighbor, and a lot of other things like that.

  When he started to run down, we got away from him. There ain’t anything more embarrassing than a crazy adult who likes to talk with kids.

  We decided that maybe we should show Butch around a bit and let him in on some of the things we had been doing.

  So we struck off down Dark Hollow and we didn’t make much time because all of these friends of Nature Boy were popping out to join him. Before very long, we were a sort of traveling menagerie—rabbits and chipmunks and a gopher or two and a couple of raccoons.

  I like Nature Boy, of course, and I’ve had some good times with him, but he has spoiled a lot of fun as well. Before he showed up in the neighborhood, I did a lot of fishing and hunting, but that is all spoiled now. I can’t shoot a squirrel or catch a fish without wondering if it is a friend of Nature Boy’s.

  After a while, we got down to the creek bed where we were digging out the lizard. We’d been at it all summer long and we hadn’t uncovered very much of him, but we still figured that some day we might get him all dug out.

  You understand that it wasn’t a live lizard we were digging out, but a lizard that had turned to stone a zillion years ago.

  There is a place where the stream runs down a limestone ledge and the limestone lies in layers. The lizard was between two of those layers. We’d got four or five feet of his tail uncovered. But the digging was getting harder, for we were working back into the limestone ledge and there was more of it to move.

  Fancy Pants floated up above the limestone ledge and got himself set as solid as he could. Sitting there, he hit that limestone ledge a tremendous whack, being very careful not to crack the lizard. It was one of his better whacks, busting up a lot of stone, and while Fancy Pants rested up to take another one, the three of us piled in and threw out the busted rock.

  But there was one big piece he had loosened up that we couldn’t move.

  “Hit it just a tap,” I told him. “Break it up a little and we can get it out.”

  “I got it loose,” he said. “It’s up to you to get it out.”

  There was no sense arguing with him. So the three of us wrestled at the rock, but we couldn’t budge it and Fancy Pants sat up there, fat and sassy, taking it easy and enjoying himself.

  “You ought to have a crowbar,” he told us. “If you had a crowbar, you could pry that rock out.”

  I was getting sick and tired of Fancy Pants, and so, just to get away from him for a while, I said I’d go and fetch a crowbar. And this new kid, Butch, said he’d go along with me.

  So we left Nature Boy and Fancy Pants and climbed up to the road and started out for my place. We didn’t hurry any. It would serve Fancy Pants right if he had to wait, and Nature Boy as well, for all his showing off with his animals.

  We walked along the road and talked. Butch told me about the planet he had come from and it sure was a poor-mouth place, and I told him about the neighborhood, and we were getting to be friends.

  We reached the Carter place and were walking past the orchard when Butch stopped dead in the middle of the road and went sort of stiff, like a hunting dog will go when he scents a bird.

  I was walking right behind him and I bumped into him, but he just stood there with those eager eyes agleam and his entire body tense—so tense it seemed to quiver when it really didn’t.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  He kept on looking at something in the orchard. I took a look where he was looking and I couldn’t see a thing.

  Then he turned around like a flash and jumped the fence on the downhill side of the road and went lickety-split down across the field opposite the orchard. I jumped the fence and ran after him and caught him just before he reached the woods. I grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around to face me. it wasn’t hard to do, he was such a spindly kid.

  “What’s the matter with you?” I hollered. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Home to get my gun!”

  “Your gun? What for?”

  “There’s a whole bunch of them up there! We have to clean them out!”

  He must have seen I didn’t understand.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said, “that you didn’t see them?”

  I shook my head. “There wasn’t anything there.”

  “They’re there, all right,” he said. “Maybe you can’t see them. Maybe you’re like old folks.”

  There’s no one who can accuse me of a thing like that. I doubled up my fist and poked it underneath his nose. He hurried up to explain.

  “They’re things that only kids can see. And they bring bad luck. You can’t leave them around or you’ll have bad luck all the time.”

  I didn’t believe it right away. But after all the things I’d seen done by Nature Boy and Fancy Pants, you don’t ever catch me saying straight out that a thing’s impossible.

  And after I’d thought it over for a minute, it made a silly sort of sense. For the folks certainly had been plagued by hard luck for a long time now and it didn’t stand to reason that luck should be all bad and never any good unless there was something making it that way.

  And it wasn’t the folks alone, but all the other neighbors—all of them, of course, except Andy Carter, and Andy Carter was too mean to be bothered by bad luck.

  We were, I thought, sure a hard-luck neighborhood.

  “All right,” I said to Butch. “Let’s go and get that gun.”

  And I was thinking even as I said it that it must be a funny kind of gun that would shoot a thing one couldn’t even see.

  We made it back to the old Pierce place in almost no time at all. Butch’s Pa was sitting out underneath a tree, feeling sorry for himself. Butch came up to him and started jabbering and I couldn’t understand a word.

  His Pa listened to him for a while and then broke in. “You should talk this planet’s language, son. It is most impolite to do otherwise. And you want to become a good citizen of this great and glorious planet, I am sure, and there’s no better way to do it than to talk its language and observe its customs and try to live the way its people do.”

  I’ll say this much for him: Butch’s Pa sure knew how to fling around the words.

  “Is it true, mister,” I asked him, “that these things can bring bad luck?”

  “Most assuredly,” said Butch’s Pa. “Back on our old home planet, we know them well.”

 
“Pa,” asked Butch, “should I get my gun?”

  “Now I don’t know,” said his Pa. “It’s something we have to give some study. Back on our home planet, there would be no question of it. But this is a different planet and it may have different ways. It may be that the man who has these creatures would object to your shooting them.”

  “But there isn’t anyone really got them,” I declared. “How can you have a thing when you can’t even see it?”

  “I was thinking about the gentleman in whose orchard they appeared.”

  “You mean Andy Carter. He doesn’t know anything about them.”

  “That does not matter,” said Butch’s Pa, with a great deal of righteousness. “It becomes, it would seem to me, a quite deep problem in ethics. On our home planet, no man would want these things; he’d be ashamed to have them. But here it might be different. They bring good luck, you see, to the ones that they adopt.”

  “You mean they bring good luck to Andy?” I asked him. “But I thought you said that they brought bad luck.”

  “So they do,” said Butch’s Pa, “except to the ones that they adopt. To them they bring good luck, but bad luck to all the others. For it is an axiom that fortune for one man is misfortune for the rest. That is why we do not let them adopt any of us on our home planet.”

  “You think they have adopted Andy and that’s why he has good luck?”

  “You are most correct,” said Butch’s Pa. “You have admirably grasped the concept.”

  “Well, gee, why don’t we just go in and shoot them?”

  “This Carter gentleman would not object to your doing so?”

  “Of course he would, but that’s what you would expect of him. He’d probably run us off the place before we got the job half done, but we could sneak back again …”

  “No,” Butch’s Pa said flat out.

  He was an awful stickler for doing the right thing, Butch’s Pa was—bound and determined he wasn’t going to get caught off base doing something wrong.

  “That is not the way to do,” he said. “It is most unethical. You think that if this Carter knew he had these things, he would want to keep them?”

  “I am sure he would. He doesn’t care for anybody but himself.”

  Butch’s Pa heaved a big sigh and crawled to his feet. “Young man, would your father be at home?”

  “He most likely would.”

  “We’ll go and talk with him,” he said. “He is a native of this planet and an honest man and he will tell us what is right.”

  “Mister,” I asked him, “what do you call these things?”

  “We have a name for them, but it does not translate into your tongue with anything like ease. We call them something that is neither here nor there, something that is halfway between. Halfling would be the word for it, if there is such a word.”

  “I don’t know if there is or not,” I said, “but it sounds right.”

  “Then,” decided Butch’s Pa, “for sheer convenience we shall call them that.”

  At first, Pa was as flabbergasted as I was, but the more he listened to Butch’s Pa and the more he thought about it, the more he seemed to become convinced there might be something to it.

  “There sure-God has been something causing all this hard luck of ours,” he declared. “A man can’t turn his hand to a thing but it goes wrong on him. And I must admit that it makes a man sore to have all these things happen to him and then look at Carter and see all the good luck he has.”

  “I am profoundly sorry,” said Butch’s Pa, “to discover halflings exist on this planet. There were many on our old home planet and on some of the neighboring worlds, but I had no idea they had spread this far.”

  “What I don’t rightly understand,” said Pa, lighting up his pipe and settling down to hash the matter over, “is how they can be here and a man not see them.”

  “There is a most precise scientific explanation, but I have not the language to translate it. You might say that they are off-phase of this existence, but still not quite into it. The child eye is undulled, the mind unclosed, so that they can see somewhat, a fraction, just a little, beyond reality. And that is why they can be seen by children but are invisible to adults. I, in my time, when I was a child, saw and killed my share of them. You understand, sir, that on my planet, it is an accepted childish chore to be eternally on watch for them and vigilantly keep their numbers down.”

  Pa asked me: “You didn’t see these things?”

  “No, Pa,” I said, “I didn’t.”

  “And you didn’t see them, either?” Pa asked Butch’s Pa.

  “I lost my ability to see them many years ago,” said Butch’s Pa. “So far as your boy is concerned, it may be that only the children of certain races—”

  “But they must see us,” Pa insisted. “Otherwise, how would they be able to bring good luck or bad?”

  “They do see us. In that, all are agreed. I assure you that the scientists of my planet have devoted many long and arduous years to the study of these beings.”

  “And another thing. What is their purpose in adopting people? What do they get out of it? Why should they show all this favoritism?”

  “We are not sure,” said Butch’s Pa. “There are several theories. One is that they have no life of their own, but must have a pattern in order to live. If they did not have a pattern, they would have no form nor senses and probably no perception. They are, it would seem, like parasites in many ways.”

  But Pa interrupted him. Pa was all wound up and had a lot of thinking that he had to do out loud.

  “I don’t suppose,” he said, “that they are doing it just for the hell of it. There must be a solid reason—there is to everything. It seems reasonable to me that everything is planned, that there’s nothing without purpose. There’s nothing, when you get right down to it, that basically is bad. Maybe these things, with the bad luck that they bring, are part of a plan to make folks face up to adversity and develop character.”

  I swear it was the first time I had ever heard Pa sound like a preacher, but he sure did then.

  “You may be right,” said Butch’s Pa. “There is no agreement entirely on the reason for their being.”

  “They might,” suggested Pa, “be a sort of gypsy tribe, just wandering around. They might up and move away.”

  Butch’s Pa sadly shook his head. “It almost never happens, sir, that they move away.”

  “When I was a kid, I once went to the city with my Ma. I don’t remember much about it, but I do remember standing in front of a great big window that was filled with toys and knowing that I could never have any one of them, and wishing hard that some day I might have just one of them. Maybe that’s the way it is with these folks. Maybe they’re just outside the window looking in on us.”

  “Your analogy is exceedingly picturesque,” said Butch’s Pa with forthright admiration.

  “But here I am running on,” Pa said, “as if I took for gospel every word of it. I don’t wish for the world to doubt you or what you told us …”

  “But you do and I cannot find it in my breast to blame you. Would you, perhaps, believe more readily if your son could tell you that he saw them?”

  “Why, yes,” Pa said thoughtfully. “I surely would.”

  “Before I came to Earth, I was a worker in the field of optics, and it may be possible that I can grind a set of lenses that would allow your son to see halflings. I am not sure he could, of course, but it is a chance worth taking. He is of the age to have still that ability to peer beyond reality. It may be that all his vision needs is a slight correction.”

  “If you could do that, if Steve here could really see these things, then I would believe you without the slightest question.”

  “I’ll get on with it immediately,” said Butch’s Pa. “Later on, we can discuss the ethics of the situation.”

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nbsp; Pa sat watching Butch and his Pa going down the road, and he sort of shuddered. “Some of these aliens sure-God come up with queer ideas. A man has got to watch himself or he might swallow some of them.”

  “These ones are all right,” I told him.

  Pa sat there thinking and I could almost see the wheels whirring in his brain. “I don’t know too much about it, but the more one thinks about it, the more sense it makes. It seems reasonable to me that there might be just so much good luck and so much bad luck, and ordinarily both the good and the bad would be handed out in somewhat equal parts. But suppose something came along and corralled all the good luck for one particular man, then there ain’t anything but bad luck left for the rest.”

  I wished that I could see it as clear as Pa. But the more I thought, the more like Greek it seemed.

  “Maybe,” said Pa, “when you get to the root of it, it’s nothing more than simple competition. What is good luck for one man is bad luck for another. Say there is a job that everybody wants. One man gets it and that’s good luck for him, but bad luck for the others. And say that this bear back in the woods just had to raid a hive. It would be bad luck for the man whose hive was raided, but good luck—or at least not bad luck—for the man whose hive the bear passed up. And say again that someone’s tractor had to get busted …”

  Pa went on like that for quite a while, but I don’t think he even fooled himself. Both of us knew, I guess, that there would have to be more to it than that.

  Fancy Pants and Nature Boy were sore at me for not coming back with the crowbar. They said I stood them up and I had to explain to them I hadn’t and I had to tell them exactly what had happened before they would believe me. I suppose it might have been better if I had kept my mouth shut, but in the end I don’t believe it made much difference.

  Anyhow, we got to be friends again and we all liked Butch, so we had good times together. The other two kidded Butch a lot about the halflings at first, but Butch didn’t seem to mind, so they gave it up.